The Secret Life of Birds

Jan 12, 2025 10:06 AM

Author:Colin Tudge

In The Secret Life of Birds, lifelong bird enthusiast Colin Tudge explores the extraordinary variety, secret history and hidden importance of birds around the world.

Birds are beautiful, intriguing and life-enhancing. They can do everything mammals can, and even more besides. Collected here are birds who navigate using the stars, tool-making crows, territorial robins, cooperative penguins and swans who mate for life - among hundreds of others.

Revealing everything from why birds sing to how they fly, think, bond and survive, from how they evolved (and whether it really is from dinosaurs) to why, in so many ways, they are very much like us, this rich, evocative book will make you love and admire the birds that are all around you.

'Enjoyable ... entertaining ... masterful'

  Stephen Moss, Guardian

'Simply fizzing with ideas ... his heart is with the birds'

  Literary Review

'Inspired ... Tudge's writing is always clear and frequently embellished with wry humour'

  Richard Fortey, Sunday Telegraph

'Only when we read this scintillating study do we see how little we've known about the creatures we see around us'

  Michael Kerrigan, Scotsman Books of the Year

'An author whose own deep relish for the extraordinary lives of birds seems only marginally less pleasurable to him than sharing that wonder with others'

  BBC Wildlife Magazine

When Colin Tudge was a small boy, he could recognize only five kinds of birds. After studying zoology at Cambridge, Colin wrote for the New Scientist and was a documentary maker for BBC radio. His other books, also published by Penguin, include The Secret Life of Trees and So Shall We Reap: What's Gone Wrong with the World's Food - and How to Fix It.

Reviews

extraordinary

—— Mail on Sunday

Dully has written a forceful account of his survival

—— Observer

astonishingly free of rancour

—— The Times

...one of the saddest stories you'll ever read

—— New York Times

...his story is both moving and revolting...he faces his past honestly

—— FT magazine

truly stunning

—— Publishers Weekly

Kealey writes with enthusiasm and panache... exhilarating and exciting

—— Lancet

This is a compassionate, front-line report from what can often seem like alien territory.

—— Daily Telegraph Summer Reads

The practice of medicine is a way of living: vivid and engrossing, it stimulates senses physical and metaphysical...It is a rare skill for a doctor to be able to communicate this rich sensorium in writing. It is a delight to read the words of one who does it so well

—— The Economist

A superb account of life on the grisly front line of the operating theatre

—— Christopher Hart , Sunday Times

This slender, elegantly written memoir by a female surgeon, Gabriel Weston, is a fascinating, no holds barred account of life in the operating theatre

—— Independent

Through this insightful book, Weston succeeds superbly in communicating the fascinating brutal reality of a surgeon's life

—— Ian Critchley , Daily Telegraph

Gabriel Weston's story succeeds better than any I have known...more riveting and thought-provoking than any fiction

—— The Lady, Susan Hill

Glinting like a tray of instruments, her prose is satisfyingly precise

—— Victoria Segal , The Guardian

A curiously thrilling read, written with an elegance heightened by its clarity and economy

—— Elizabeth Day , Observer

A valuable and unflinching account, since it so clearly tells the truth

—— Christopher Hart , The Sunday Times

This book is mesmerising

—— William Leith , Scotsman

Her description of the struggle to remain individual and hence moral is her real achievement. This, to me, is what female writing has to do, and she does it with style and humour and beauty

—— Rachel Cusk

This much appreciated book should be a must-read for everyone who likes to travel, and should be translated into the languages of the world's tourism champions. It should also be a must-read for politicians and decision makers in development agencies to finally understand that tourism has lost the 'virginity' of a harmless leisure sector to develop into a dangerous global driving force which needs to be regulated and restricted.

—— Contours magazine

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